On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.

The new new digg has a google plus / pinterest vibe going on, combined with a minimalist, almost Windows 8 feel. The question is, is it enough to re-launch digg as “relevant” or has it now lost any forward momentum at all and will revert back to a once great, but now struggling to reclaim it’s glory, website.

Time will tell. I loved the pre-new Digg v4 and I have hopes that the new new digg will do as well!

Reading this Sony SmartWatch Review it’s hard to think that anything good will come from a review that starts with the line: “Maybe the Worst Thing Sony Has Ever Made”.

But then you look at it for more than a few seconds or so, maybe try touching it, and a thing you have strapped to your arm suddenly starts to make you unhappy. Unhappy and perplexed. A thing actually on your body confuses your brain, and it’s not a tattoo of a Mobius strip or something. The SmartWatch requires a constant Bluetooth connection with an Android phone to do anything smart at all—otherwise it’ll just blink errors at you, slackjawed, and show you the time. Similarly, you’ll need the Android mothership to load any app you might want onto the thing—simply, it’s non-functional without a phone in your bag or pocket, and because of the dinosaur Bluetooth connection, sluggish even when its phone mom is around.
[…] Nobody is really sure what a retina display is, but we can all say with absolute certainty that this is the opposite of it.

Simplicity is not the same as slashing-and-burning features that you personally never use. I know that 37signal’s web 3.0 siren song of “simple and beautiful” is tempting, but it’s done more damage than good: Developers get sucked in to this “people only understand simple” fantasy world and forget that they’re developers, not designers, and not only that but in this case they don’t even represent their own target market.

I think that the ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ quote is appropriate here as well, and that while I love Linux, it’s time to face certain realities and start aiming at

Great conversation about email the the long term viability of online resources such as FourSquare and Facebook. Emails to My Unborn Daughter is not the “Dear Sophie” google ad that you might be thinking of, but instead a real person who has been sending emails to his son for the last 5 years.

For the past five years, I’ve been writing emails to my son. Shortly after he was born in 2007, I created an email account in his name so I could write to him throughout his childhood and then turn the account over to him when he was of age. Upon opening the account for the first time, he’d be greeted with an archive of his childhood as seen through his father’s eyes.

“Microsoft Studios is always evaluating its portfolio of products to determine what is best for gamers, families and the company, and this decision was the result of the natural ebb and flow of our portfolio management. Many factors were considered in the difficult decision to stop development on “Microsoft Flight” and “Project Columbia,” but we feel it will help us better align with our long-term goals and development plans. For “Microsoft Flight,” we will continue to support the community that has embraced the title and the game will still be available to download for free at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight/.”

My buddy Khensu pointed out that tomorrow is Sysadmin Day! While I joked that sysadmins consider the normal day to day abuse as love, seriously, take a second to appreciate that without the neckbeard you keep in the basement you wouldn’t be able to:

With that in mind, we embarked on a journey to bring ultra-high speeds to Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo. And today, we’re excited to announce Google Fiber. Google Fiber is 100 times faster than today’s average broadband. No more buffering. No more loading. No more waiting. Gigabit speeds will get rid of these pesky, archaic problems and open up new opportunities for the web. Imagine: instantaneous sharing; truly global education; medical appointments with 3D imaging; even new industries that we haven’t even dreamed of, powered by a gig.

A map must be comprehensive and accurate no matter where you are or what device you use. We also believe maps can be useful in ways you might not have imagined. With today’s release of Google Earth for iOS you can literally fly through breathtaking 3D city landscapes and images and follow virtual tours of places you’ve never been — all with a simple swipe of your fingertip. It’s a new, and I think magical way to explore the world in which we live.

I’ve played with this a bit on my new iPad and I have to say, the locations where the 3D imagery is in is stunningly cool. Like looking at something out of a movie, or from an amazingly well rendered system, except it’s all programatic. The downside (for now) is that the loading of the 3D areas is slow (no doubt a lot of people are doing what I’m doing and playing with it) and the 3D areas are limited (again, this will improve in time).

I suspect there’s some sort of irony in that no doubt now more iOS users will get the 3D imagery than Android users, due to the new maps being restricted to Android 4.0+ (no one in our office here has an android that’s higher than 2.3, so this is my first glimpse of the new maps).

GIMP Magazine features the amazing works created from this world wide community. Photography, digital arts, graphic arts, design, tips & tricks, step by step tutorials, master classes, help desk questions, book and product reviews and so much more are showcased and explored in this quarterly publication. This publication is available for free and is licensed Creative Commons CC-AT-SA 2.5.

The EOS M features a compact, magnesium-alloy body, and will be available in four colours - black, white, silver and red. It has no built-in flash, but instead a hot shoe on the top plate, and in many markets (although not the US) it will come bundled with the new AAA-powered Speedlite 90EX unit. There’s neither a built-in viewfinder, nor connector for an external unit - composition is solely using the camera’s rear screen (which is fixed, rather than articulated).

Summary: This release includes support for metadata checksums in ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with tools like Systemtap or perf, a sandboxing mechanism that allows to filters syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for Android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available.

Sadly not as exciting as it used to be back in the 1.0 and 2.0 days, but still, progress is progress :)

Sparrow is a mobile and desktop mail client that is tightly integrated with GMail, and it was just announced that Google acquired Sparrow and will integrate into Gmail. Very interesting. As with all acquisitions, this could go well, as Sparrow is an excellent client, or could go terribly, as it did with Twitters acquisition of Tweetie.

On July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers and one photographer stood together on a patch of ground about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. They’d marked the spot “Ground Zero. Population 5” on a hand-lettered sign hammered into the soft ground right next to them.

Not sure what’s bigger, their balls or the tumors no doubt growing in their brains… :)

For some time, Gabe has been interested in the possibility of moving Steam and the Source game engine to Linux. At the time, the company was already using Linux by supporting Linux-based servers for Source-based games and also by maintaining several internal servers (running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu server) for various projects. In 2011, based on the success of those efforts and conversations in the hallway, we decided to take the next step and form a new team. At that time, the team only consisted of a few people whose main purpose was investigating the possibility of moving the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 over to Ubuntu.

The WD Red NAS drives balance power consumption, reliability and performance and are “designed to be run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week compared with normal desktop HDDs which were designed to be run 8 hours a day, 5 days a week,” Chang explains.

So you wrote this article basically to say “we’re going to have something VERY similar to the software keyboard from iOS”? Seems like you could have saved a lot of time and money on research just by copying.

It’s true, I admit I only skimmed the article, but I was looking at all the screenshots and looking for anything that’s different from iOS (other than the styling of the keyboard), and couldn’t really find it.

Well, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but I was browsing r/askreddit today and found this thread asking people about how long it’s taken for “Karma” to kick in (ie: getting asked for a job by someone who used to bully you).

Congratulations on your new position with Yahoo. I’ve been a huge fan of Google for a long time and have admired the work that you’ve done there. Google Maps, specifically, has been a big part of my life. Google Maps is the primary reason I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone in fact. The ability to add my maps as a layer on a mobile device when I go to photograph a new city is, for me, an incredibly important feature.

Yahoo has, with Flickr, the core to launch a serious contender to both Google+ and Facebook. Flickr is not “just photos.” Within the DNA of Flickr is a highly social property with serious potential if given the right resources and attention. Flickr Groups could become a powerhouse for groups all across the web that have nothing to do with photography. Competition is fierce though and time is short. Google Events is the first step towards creating a more meaningful group experience at Google and they did Google Events really, really well. It almost feels like it was built for, yes, wait for it — photographers.

With the help of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota and the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, we’ve added 360-imagery of many important spots, inside and out, such as the South Pole Telescope, Shackleton’s hut, Scott’s hut, Cape Royds Adélie Penguin Rookery and the Ceremonial South Pole.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, as Office 2013 doesn’t look a lot different in layout (the theme looks very different, the new “flat” Windows 8 desktop look), and with it’s love of lots of menus, buttons and scrollers, you don’t have to be a genius to see it’d need basically a full rebuild and UI re-do (IMHO).

Staying late one night to finish an assignment that was due at midnight, you happened to catch a glimpse over one of the quiet uber-programmer’s shoulders. Your eyes twinkled from the glow of rows upon rows of monitors in the darkened computer lab as you witnessed in awe the impossible patterns of code and text manipulation that flashed across the screen.

I’ve written about Photosmith before as the program that I’ve wanted to build myself ever since I discovered Lightroom and a smartphone. Now PhotoSmith version 2.1 is released promising to fix pretty much all of my complaints about the program when I initially purchased it. Better use of previews, more stable syncing of large collections, and tons more.

Sadly you can’t (currently) get the version 2.1 update due to some release issues that were found right after it went live, and I know that the photosmith team is working hard to determine where the errors are coming from and fixing them ASAP. Ping them over at @photosmithapp with some words of encouragement.

My buddy Aryk pointed me to this video from Australia’s Got Talent: George & Noriko who are buskers who play…. “fusion music” is about as cloase as I can describe it. Really it has to be seen to be believed:

The new Tiny Wings project, for which we saw a singularly charming trailer, is actually a free update to the Tiny Wings you already have, and not a sequel you’ll have to pay for. TouchArcade caught the news when the update went live on New Zealand’s iOS App Store, revealing a new mode called “Flight School” that has you racing across 15 new levels against three AI birds.

Actually it’s live now for me (app store link) with the following changelog:

What’s New in Version 2.0

Hi Tiny Wings fans! The long-awaited Tiny Wings 2 is finally done! I’ve put a lot of love into creating this major update, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. You’ll be getting a completely new game mode with 15 hand-designed levels, a whole flock of baby birds, fish, and other surprises! And here’s the best part: Tiny Wings 2 is a free update, as a thank-you to my loyal fans (and because I don’t particularly like in-app purchases). :)
Thanks, and have fun!

What’s new:

A new game mode: “Flight School”

15 hand-crafted levels that really “flow”

A few new additions to the bird family

Hello shiny Retina Display! Tiny Wings is now as lovely as you are.

Night flights

iCloud support (even syncs your game between the iPhone & iPad versions)

To echo someone on twitter, “please someone make this real”. Check out .Mail, a concept email client by Tobias van Schneider. It’s all just concept work, but takes into account a ton of the issues that we have with email today, without feeling like it’s re-inventing the wheel.

With Mozilla Thunderbird recently calling it quits, there’s a nice gap for an open source, high quality email client, and here are the blueprints for it.

“Gutsy” is one word for it. I’d go with “ballsy” and “I can’t wait to see how it goes”. The blog post goes into the details of it, but in short he took out all the ads and set up a $4/month membership. You pay, he writes. About as simple as you can get.

This will be (I think) a touchstone of what online published could become. It could be a complete failure, or it could work fantastically. A great episode of Build and Analyze a few weeks ago, and then reiterated on last week’s show basically put it out there that your (the viewer’s) eyeballs are more valuable to advertisers than they are to readers.

IE: If you are willing to pay $x for a “product” (website, online service, etc), an advertising agency will pay the website or online service owner more than $x because as an eyeball to put ads in front of, you have more potential value than that. I’ve phrased it poorly but hopefully you get the picture.

I have no idea what a “real” advertiser will pay for a moderately popular site to run an ad or RSS feed ad, but I’m fascinated to see what happens, and I really hope that @BenjaminBrooks follows up in a couple of weeks to let us know how it goes.

The rumor mill keeps on heating up about the possibilities (or depending on who you read, certainty) that Apple will release a 7” iPad (or iPad Junior as @danbenjamin wants it to be called), and I wanted to throw a couple of quick links out to people interested in this.

First of all, John Gruber weighed in at Daring Fireball, working through what is it, why Apple would or wouldn’t do it, the fact that Steve Jobs famously said that Apple would never make a 7” tablet, cost factors, etc. A well thought out piece.

If you want a comparison of what it would look like (hint, it’s not a 7” tablet) you can check out Trojankitten’s mockup comparision of tablet sizes. Fairly illuminating as to how when people talk about the ‘7 inch iPad’ you shouldn’t picture an Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 with an Apple logo slapped on.

New Dropbox Pro plans for those who haven’t figured out how to get more than the default free 2G yet (or need way more than you can get with referrals and DropQuests).

Today we’re happy to announce that our upgrades are getting a huge upgrade! Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans. For those of you who need even more space, a brand new 500 GB plan is also joining the posse! If you’re already a Dropbox Pro subscriber, just take a seat and enjoy the fireworks — your Dropbox will supersize itself automatically tonight.

I have to say that while I don’t normally go for something that will make my phone bulkier, Scott Wilson’s kickstarter project TAKTIK: Premium Protection System for the iPhone not only looks super-cool, but looks like it could protect your phone from being run over by a tank.

The only thing I don’t like about these cases is that they cover up all the ports, making use with accessories harder, but that looks like the price you pay for this sort of high end protection. Looks like a great product for people who spend their days not in front of a keyboard and monitor, but actually out and about.

I’d argue that the last truly revolutionary version of Windows was Windows 95. In the subsequent 17 years, we’ve seen a stream of mostly minor and often inconsequential design changes in Windows - at its core, you’ve got the same old stuff: a start menu, a desktop with icons, taskbar at the bottom, overlapping windows, toolbars, and pull-down menus.

First saw on MacRumors that Apple has seeded the OS/X Mountain Lion GM to Developers. The GM is the ‘Gold Master’, and while this doesn’t mean that a release to end users is coming any second now, it does mean that the release is very close, I’d say within “weeks”, but to make the ship date of “July” there are only 3 left in the month anyway.

Apple released the Golden Master (GM) version of OS X Mountain Lion to developers today. The “golden master” designation indicates that this version of the software is intended to be the final version released to the public, barring any last-minute issues. The Build is 12A269.

No idea if this hints at a release date previous to the 19th, but we (the ones who will download and install this the second it’s released) can hope.

Word Lens for Androidl is now available. This is the former iOS exclusive app which lets you auto-translate text by pointing your phone camera at it and reading from the screen in real time. Super, super cool.

Much of Mozilla’s leadership — including that of the Thunderbird team — has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts. (For more information about the path to this conclusion, see the “Background Information” section below.) As a result, the Thunderbird team has developed a plan that provides both stability for Thunderbird’s current state and allows the Thunderbird community to innovate if it chooses.

This is very sad to me. I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years now, on all three major OSs. On Ubuntu Linux it’s the default mail client (sorry, but Evolution is still stuck back in 2002), it’s the only (decent, IMHO) free mail client for Windows (Outlook is horrible and if you’re not working at a corporation or want something free it’s not there for you). I am ok with Apple’s Mail.app, but it’s not going to do it for everyone, and Thunderbird runs great under Mac OS.

Hopefully folks in the Thunderbird community will take up the mantle and continue to update Thunderbird in the future.

Software patents will not be granted under any possible circumstance; software is code, code is written, writing is protected by copyright, and that’s all the protection it needs. All existing software patents will be declared invalid. This will not be done ‘actively’ (i.e., there will not be groups of clerks sifting through granted patents), but rather, ‘passively’; software patents are simply declared invalid, so if someone brings them to court, they will be tossed out immediately. Within 15 years, the system will be purged of all software patents either by the courts, or simply by patents expiring.

X-Men director Bryan Singer is cooking up something kinda groundbreaking: a sprawling, science fiction epic series made for the Internet. Why the Internet? Because it’s about a future where humans are hardwired to the ‘Net.

Count me in to hardwired to the net. Other than the bad things of course :)

I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft, but i have to give them kudos for their Windows 8 Upgrade Price. $40 is peanuts and is encroaching on Apple territory for the “oh sure, why not” price for the OS.

Users of Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows Vista will be able to purchase and download Windows 8 Pro for just $39.99, a Microsoft spokesman said. “We set out to make it as easy as possible for everyone to upgrade to Windows 8,” said the spokesman.

Compared to the pain in the butt factor of pirating, defeating the Windows Genuine Advantage, getting upgrades, dealing with whatever spyware is included in the keygens…. $40 is completely worth it. I don’t think it’s quite as loose as Apple (which allows you to use the OS update software on up to 5 computers), but this is an upgrade to the Windows 8 Pro, not the normal consumer version. Anything shy of a three digit price is a huge win over the $200 Windows 7 upgrade price, or the $450Vista Ultimate cost in the days of old.

So good on you microsoft, if I have any windows machines around when Windows 8 is released, I’ll be upgrading.

So normally I am fairly “meh” on the whole subject of desktop wallpapers, just because there are so many sites (interfacelift, wallbase, etc) that are all, lets be honest, pretty much the same. However, I saw Desktoppr I have to admit I got interested.

First of all, it’s the same idea, a collection of high quality wallpaper. Nothing super-cool so far. But here’s the twist… they link with your dropbox account. So here’s how it works. You sign up (hit up the @desktopprapp twitter account for the beta code) and link your Dropbox account to the site. While you’re browsing the site you click the little cloud icon and boom, wallpaper downloaded to your Dropbox folder. Excited yet? I thought so.

On your desktop computer then you just point your desktop at the folder and set it to auto-change every X minutes and now you desktop backgrounds synced from the cloud. Super cool x 3! The only downside is that Mac OS is the only OS that natively supports using a folder as a desktop wallpaper target. On windows you’ll need software to do this or this cool trick (though that’ll only work on the wallpapers you already have downloaded) and on Linux you’ll need a hack like this to make it work.

It’s one of those super-simple, “why did I not think of that” ideas (with a hint of “I can’t believe this hasn’t been done before”). Simple, and works well (though the system is in beta and the promise that they’re going to break everything).